There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Read
I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the challenges and isolation experienced when attempting to influence the future significantly.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. expresses the loneliness that can accompany the aspiration to shape the future or play a significant role in it, likening such ambition to a divine responsibility. The metaphor of 'playing God' suggests that those who desire to guide or control the course of events may encounter solitude, as their aspirations and the burden of responsibility can separate them from others.
In practice
In a motivational speech emphasizing the importance of leadership and foresight.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.
Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
It's not about 'what can I accomplish?' but 'what do I want to accomplish?' Paradigm shift.
Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.
War: A by-product of the arts of peace.
What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past -- problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation? He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep.
To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.
Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.
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